Narrative defeats facts at RawStory

One of the most obvious signs of bias in mainstream news stems from the failure of a story to back its headline. Often in such cases the headline supports a media narrative but flies in the face of the reported facts.

Raw Story produced a good example of this with a Jan. 2, 2018 story reporting on research from Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan.

The headline:

Trump supporters far more likely to read and share ‘fake news’ on social media: study

And the story (bold emphasis added):

They’re still measuring the degree to which fake news impacted the 2016 election, however, this study only measured how often stories were read, not whether they were believed or spread.

It would be interesting to study how much this story was shared and what percentage of the audience believed the headline version as opposed to the text of the story.

Note: We emailed the corrections department at Raw Story about the problem before publishing this item. We will update the item to describe Raw Story’s actions in response.

Update Jan 5, 2018:

As of 1 a.m. on Jan. 5, 2018, we have detected no response from either Raw Story. Nor do we detect any change to the story in response to our concerns.

Our message to the corrections team from Jan. 3, 2017 may be found here, along with our Jan 4, 2017 Twitter outreach to the story’s author, Sarah Burris.